When Inlaws bully a targeted spouse there is seldom, if ever, a winner. The adult child of the bully ends up far worse for wear, typically triangulated between affection for his or her love interest and children and a desire to please their irrational grandiose parent or parents who are abusing their own offspring’s choice of a mate.
It is a timeless, relevant problem for many kind, empathic, and otherwise happy, pro-social, and loving couples to face together as well as overcome. You marry the person who you love and adore only to find out later on their family unit chooses to act in ways that are morally reprehensible towards you and socially deplorable towards your mate overall.
Once you realize there is a problem, the pressing question of the day becomes, “What now?”
If your family is brutal (among themselves) and likes to engage in rallying together to mob against others, know that you are not alone. Cluster B family units tend to enjoy social mobbing and hunting in packs.
When Inlaws meddle in a Machiavellian manner to do things like unnerve, to upset, to undermine, and or to deliberately manufacture social and emotional confusion for a spouse or romantic partner they consider “an outsider” that’s exactly the social dynamic from the playground the likely childhood bullies (too) create in the contemporary.
The website tolovehonorandvacuum.com shared the following insight about when Inlaws meddle in a couple’s relationship. They write,
“Sometimes bullying, especially in families, is more covert.
If you call out an adult bully, they reply with incredulity, “I was just asking questions! I cannot believe you took it that way,” putting the blame back on you.
And then you start to wonder if you are the crazy one.
Yet even if you turn yourself inside out to try to please the bully, you never will, because bullies thrive on the feeling of instilling fear. Meet one demand and they will come up with another.
Maybe it is time our British, “don’t rock the boat” culture learned something from the Italians, who say everything. So let’s practice: “You are being inappropriate.” “I won’t sit here and listen if you talk to me like that.” “You are a guest in this home, Mom, so you should treat us with respect.”
Or, better still, stand up for someone else. “Dad, you owe [KRISTI] an apology. You were completely out of line.”
And if they start yelling or criticizing you, just repeat it. Then stand up and leave the room. There is no law requiring you to sit in a chair and be insulted.”
The topic is large and everyone seems to have a different day by day and minute to minute reaction to how to survive in the trenches with toxic family meddling in their romantic relationship.
Our take on toxic Inlaws is this —
The more you know about your mate and how they were raised the better. But not if finding out more about things like what they were like when they were little, who the ancestry connections are or are not, or the stories they share with their siblings and early childhood caregivers like a cult to hoard is worth spending a single moment in life enduring their derision or any crazy-making.
Their behavior is socially inappropriate at best if they are striving to create misery in the life of someone they are blood-related to and are likely to pretend they love. At worst, they are people with the mindset of bands of roving date-rape mentality indulging people whose own emotional and social hedonism and gluttony coupled with their own grandiosity makes them think it is perfectly okay to do things like lying to manufacture chaos in the lives of others because they feel like it and they enjoy doing it.
Encouraging a spouse, for instance, to get back in touch with a toxic family unit he or she has been avoiding can net gain knowledge. But it can also open the door to let family bullies menace you, your wife or husband, and things like any of your personal tech.
For that reason, if you are just starting out a relationship with a person who claims to be in low contact or no contact status with a relative — parent, ex, sibling, grandparent, or even with their own child — do not fall into the trap of thinking that person needs to get back in touch with those people in order for them to feel whole or to treat you and any impacted children or loved ones in your family in a way that is better.
People who are not in contact with their family members are that way for a reason. Find out why before you go encouraging them to resolve social anxiety by making an appeal to Social Predators.
If the estranged family unit or person in question is likely to trigger or to push buttons in your mate or to triangulate them from you by causing them to feel ashamed in some way about who you are, you and your mate will never be better off from having invited that kind of viper energy into your personal life.
A bully is a bully no matter their age, religion, social status, or education. An Inlaw who bullies is a control seeking person.
The question is not what you should do about easing or repairing their nasty personality issues or why you have been targeted. It’s to figure out why you or your mate seems to choose to tolerate, to overlook, or to minimize the medical impact of the stress that bullying and social abuse of you personally is creating for not only you as their target but on your mate and any children who are exposed to the abuse or who live as a direct result with an emotionally or socially injured, insulted, and or offended and ostracized parent, caretaker, or parents.
The best way to deal with a bully is to avoid any situation that puts you on their radar. Going low to no contact, communicating only basic information related to necessary communication in writing, and or avoiding interacting with an abusive or disgruntled Inlaw is recommended by professionals and victims who have survived the trauma quite highly.
And if you can’t do the above strive to resist the urge when they insult to look them directly in the face while narrowing your eyes. And by all means, strive to avoid blurting things out at them after they hurl an insult at you like, “I know you are — but what am I?” in response to their intentionally insulting prompting or baiting.
Why?
Because your mate might laugh. And then the Social Predator will more than likely be even angrier at them for choosing a person “like you” as their mate.
Realize your partner is in a “No Win Situation”. Inlaws who attack their own adult children’s romantic partners are for lack of a more accurate psychological phrase or key term… bananas.
